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October 8, 2008 9:25 AM
by Mike Collett-White
LONDON - A 1000-year-old carved rock crystal ewer, one of only seven known surviving examples, fetched 3.2 million pounds ($7 million) at auction on Tuesday, Christie's said.
The ewer is the same one that came up for auction in Britain in January this year, when it was catalogued as a 19th century French claret jug and valued at 100-200 pounds.
In fact experts now believe it is an extremely rare ewer from the Fatimid dynasty which ruled parts of northern Africa and the Middle East in the 10th-12th centuries.
Reflecting its importance it sold in January for 220,000
pounds ($480,000), although auction house sources said
that transaction was later "annulled by agreement." They
gave no further details.
Christie's said the ewer, which sold to an anonymous
client in the saleroom, was made for the court of the
Fatimid rulers of Cairo in the late 10th or early 11th
century. It was embellished in enameled gold mounts
made in 1854 by a French silversmith.
By the middle of the 11th century the Fatimid state
had become so impoverished that much of the contents
of the Royal Treasury had to be sold, including ewers,
the auctioneer added.
The ewer was carved by hand from a single piece of rock
crystal, and is decorated with cheetahs and link-chains.
Of the other six surviving examples, one is in London's
Victoria & Albert Museum, two are in the treasury of the
Basilica of San Marco, Venice, one is in the Cathedral of
Fermo, Italy, another is in the Louvre in Paris and one was
stolen from the Museum of Limoges, France, in 1980.
There was one other known ewer, but it was dropped by
an employee of a museum in Florence in 1998 and shattered
irreparably, according to reports.
In April, rival auction house Sotheby's sold a 12 century key
to the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest site in Islam,
for 9.2 million pounds ($20 million), setting a new record for
an Islamic work of art at auction.
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